Henry Arthur Bright

Henry Arthur Bright (9 February 1830, Liverpool – 5 May 1884, Liverpool) was an English merchant and writer.

Early life

Bright was born in Liverpool on 9 February 1830, the eldest son of Samuel Bright (1799–1870; a younger brother of Henry Bright and the pathologist Richard Bright), by Elizabeth Anne, eldest daughter of Hugh Jones, a Liverpool banker. The family pedigree goes back to Nathaniel Bright of Worcester (1493–1564), whose grandson, Henry Bright (1562–1627), schoolmaster and canon at Worcester, purchased the manor of Brockbury in the parish of Colwall, Herefordshire, which still remained in the family.

Henry Arthur Bright, who on his mother's side was related to Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, was educated at Rugby School, under Archibald Tait, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he qualified for his degree, but as a nonconformist was unable to make the subscription then required as a condition of graduation. When this restriction had been removed, Bright and his relative James Heywood were the first nonconformists to take the Cambridge degrees of B.A. (1857) and M.A. (1860).

In business

On leaving Cambridge Bright became a partner with his father in the shipping firm of Gibbs, Bright & Co., by whose enterprise regular communication was established between this country and Australia. In May 1852 he travelled with a friend between Liverpool and New York on the SS Great Britain, which was owned by Gibbs, Bright, & Co. Bright was chairman of the sailors' home in Canning Street in 1867, and again in 1877; in the latter year the dispensary in the Custom House arcade was opened mainly through his exertions, and in August 1878 a second sailors' home, projected by him, was opened in Luton Street.